By Matt Forcey Currently available for on-premise implementation or as a managed service from Microsoft partners, SharePoint 2010 is scheduled to replace the existing SharePoint Online 2007 (SharePoint hosted in Microsoft's Azure cloud) in the second half of this calendar year. Is your organization migrating a content management platform to a new SharePoint system, or upgrading your existing SharePoint implementation to SharePoint 2010? In addition to understanding the different deployment models available to your organization, you will want to be able to interpret and explain the benefits of the six major functional areas of SharePoint Online 2010: Sites, Communities, Content, Composites, Insights, and Search. This article will provide you with an overview of each of these core functional areas, as well as take a look at how SharePoint Online 2010 is closing the feature gap between SharePoint Online and SharePoint (on-premise). SharePoint Communities is a set of tools that provide your users the ability to easily access expertise and interact with other people in new and creative ways across the enterprise through both formal and informal networks. Think of having a Facebook-like site for the employees of your company. One that focuses on their professional experience, their expertise, and credentials... not what movie they saw this weekend, or what animals they are raising on their virtual farm. Your organization's intellectual property canbecome intellectual capital if the tools are in place to mine and capture this valuable resource.
SharePoint Sites, provides the basic capabilities required to engage employees, partners, and customers in an effective manner, both inside and outside the firewall. Sites puts the tools in the hands of business users to create and manage Internet, Intranet, and Extranet sites through an intuitive, familiar user interface. "Familiar user interface" means that SharePoint 2010 adopts the same Microsoft Ribbon User Interface that is prevalent in the business productivity tools we all use daily, MS Work, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, etc. Not having to learn a new U.I. should result in faster user adoption and an accelerated earning curve.
SharePoint Content provides the facilities for the creation, review, publication, and disposal of content, including conforming to defined compliance rules, whether the content exists as traditional documents or as Web pages. Content-management capabilities of SharePoint include document management, records management, and Web-content management.
SharePoint Composites provides the ability to quickly create customized solutions without involving corporate IT in each request. At the same time, it allows IT staff capability to empower business users to create these applications while ensuring the environment’s stability and availability.
In other words, Composites enables business users to produce composite enterprise solutions using combinations of out-of-box features, without having to custom-build applications involving custom coding and development resources. An example would be rapidly implementing, within SharePoint, a custom form using a tool like Microsoft InfoPath.
SharePoint Insights provides the ability to not only rapidly deliver and share information that is critical to the success of the business, but also to turn raw data into actionable conclusions and to drive business results through sharing data-driven analysis. Using the new functionality in SharePoint Online 2010, your business managers can easily create and manage powerful information dashboards, KPIs, and scorecards. Insightsis the Business Intelligence component of SharePoint.
SharePoint Search enables users to quickly and easily locate relevant content across SharePoint lists, sites and external systems, and other data sources, such as file shares, Web sites, or line-of-business applications.
You know, one of the reasons we all like the Internet so much, and use search engines all the time, is because we are constantly exposed to ideas and information that we didn’t know existed. How many times a day do you run a search on Google or Bing, and get exposed to a new concept, idea, or piece of information that you found useful. This is how search drives “Ideation”. It works for us at home… why not at work?
Are you interested in learning more about SharePoint Online? Follow the link below to access additional information and sign up for a FREE trial of SharePoint Online: http://www.microsoft.com/online/sharepoint-online.aspx
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